Thursday, March 17, 2016

In 2003, journalist Connor Regan marched through London to add his voice to a million others, decrying the imminent invasion of Iraq. Eight months later, his brother, James, was killed in action in Mosul.

Three years on, Connor finds himself bound for Iraq to embed with an elite SAS team. He sets his boots on the ground looking for closure and solace—anything to ease the pain of his brother’s death. Instead he finds Sergeant Nathan Thompson.

Nat Thompson is a veteran commander, hardened by years of combat and haunted by the loss of his best friend. Being lumbered with a civilian is a hassle Nat doesn’t need, and he vows to do nothing more than keep the hapless hack from harm’s way.

But Connor proves far from hapless, and too compelling to ignore for long. He walks straight through the steel wall Nat’s built around his heart, and when their mission puts him in mortal danger, Nat must lay old ghosts to rest and fight to the death for the only man he’s ever truly loved.

On the fifteenth of February 2003, my sister and I joined a million people on the streets of London and put our names to the biggest antiwar protest the world had ever seen. Eight months later, our elder brother, Sergeant James Napper, was shot dead on a British Army base just south of Mosul.

I remember both days with perfect clarity. The protest had felt like a carnival in muted colours—black, white, and khaki. There were children dressed in hessian, and peace puppies with tie-dyed bandanas knotted around their necks. Cans of Red Stripe littered the ground and spicy bean burgers scented the air. If I closed my eyes and let the drums and folksy music wash over me, I could’ve been at Glastonbury—a place James would’ve found far easier to picture me, the “artsy fartsy” baby brother he still called “our kid.”

Except, I wasn’t at Glastonbury this time. Instead, I was heading to Hyde Park with a million others in the most civilised act of anarchy I’d ever seen. It was kind of beautiful; a march of peace in the truest sense of the word. It felt like it mattered, like I mattered . . . like we all did. For those precious few hours, I’d honestly believed every soul on those streets had made a difference. Little did I know James was long gone, dropped over the Turkey/Iraq border with his unit, already fighting a war the rest of the world seemed convinced they could stop.

My sister, Jenna, sixteen years old at the time, hadn’t had much concept of why we marched that day, and she went home that night with no more understanding of the turmoil in the Middle East than she’d woken up with. When the war exploded on our TV screens, it didn’t feel real to her, or even to me, with my insider knowledge from working at the Guardian. Sporadic emails from James were the same as they’d ever been, and despite the constant parade of death and violence in the news, I never dreamed any of his short, crude messages would be the last.

Naïvety, or just plain old denial, who knew? Both mind-sets suited me back then. It was almost too easy to ignore it all and pretend the uniformed men would never come to my doorstep.

But they did come. They came at dawn on a Sunday morning, and by the time they left, my brother was gone, and I knew I’d never see him again. They’d told me where and when, but despite the inquest, which didn’t take place until two years after the event, details were thin, and the final brutal moments of my brother’s life remained a mystery. For three long years, his death haunted me. Restless with grief, I did everything I could to distract myself—moved house three times, changed my role at the Guardian, but I still missed him, and as hard as I tried, I couldn’t put my heartache to bed. Couldn’t silence the nagging in my heart that I needed to show his ghost that there was more to me than the pop-culture hack he’d left behind. More to his kid brother than a Doc Marten¬s–wearing hippie who marched through London, chanting to politicians who ignored a million-strong protest like it was nothing.

The desire to prove myself to a dead man was a welcome distraction from my grief. It took a year of training and planning, but it seemed like no time at all before I found myself on a plane to the most volatile region in the Middle East.

Was I afraid? Of course I bloody was, but as the aircraft took off from Brize Norton, somehow I knew I was on a path that would change my life forever.

Garrett Leigh is a British writer and book designer, currently
working for Dreamspinner Press, Loose Id, Riptide Publishing, and Black Jazz
Press. Her protagonists will always always be tortured, crippled, broken, and
deeply flawed. Throw in a tale of enduring true love, some stubbly facial hair,
and a bunch of tattoos, and you’ve got yourself a Garrett special.

When not writing, Garrett can generally be found procrastinating
on Twitter, cooking up a storm, or sitting on her behind doing as little as
possible. That, and dreaming up new ways to torture her characters. Garrett
believes in happy endings; she just likes to make her boys work for it.

Garrett also works as a freelance cover artist for various
publishing houses and independent authors under the pseudonym G.D. Leigh. For
cover art info, please visit blackjazzpress.com.

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